The lifestyles of plants are a source of inspiration for this unconventional exhibition at Grizedale Forest.

Seeing the Forest through the Trees comes at a critical time when we are struggling evermore to devise fair ways of living alongside other ‘nonhumans’ (animals and plants). This exhibition will focus on plants and their relationship to other species by featuring works by artists who examine plants’ complexity through experiments, performances, design and action.

Plants are no less sophisticated than animals and over the course of evolution they have developed their own peculiar body shapes, lifestyles, and modes of reproduction. They are active and autonomous beings perceiving the world in ways both alien and familiar to us. The art works, featured in the exhibition reveal ways in which artists are contributing to our efforts to understand plants. Celebrating plants lives and stressing the necessity to deal with them in their own terms and for their own sake. The artists invite the audience to inquire into the plant behaviours, their cognitive abilities, their strategies to avoid and attract others and to fantasize and to dream.

Our future is tightly connected with plants there is so much we can learn as they harvest solar energy and minerals, produce oxygen and food for animals and their bodies are organized as systems and networks which are decentralized, modular, and able to feed on light.

We hope this exhibition will create the space to give plants sufficient recognition for what they are hence, as a philosopher Michael Marder claims, “an encounter with plants awaits us!”